TranSender Idea Window
The TranSender
Idea Window allows you to easily capture random and subtle
ideas without losing your concentration. The items that
you create are sent to your "InBasket" (or wherever
else you want) where you can process them and put them
into the propper context when that is your appropriate
task.
The result
is that your mind is less cluttered with thoughts and
you are more free to be creative. The TranSender
Idea Window is described more fully elsewhere. (more...)
TranSend Outliner
An option with
the TranSender Idea Window is to start outlining the context
of the idea while still in the pop-up. If you have another
thought, or some "sub" thoughts, you can easily
switch to outline mode. This is the second step in a progression
of appropriate interaction tools that will allow you to
work at your natural level of thinking, as opposed to
the level of thinking where the computer forces you to
be.
Time Logger
A time logger
is available in the TranSend Outliner. When you start
a task, you can just open a TranSender Idea Window and
keep notes about the task, or just note the name of the
task. You can pause and resume the logger while the idea
window is open. The amount of time the logger was running
is saved in Ecco with the first TLI in the idea window.
Palm ToDo-List helper
Has it ever really bugged you that the order of items
in your Ecco To-Do's view doesn't carry over to your Palm
PDA?
If you are implementing a "GTD" methodology
in Ecco, it's really helpful to re-use some of the default
Palm data attributes to keep more meaningful data available
in your pocket.
This helper makes it possible to order your "ToDo-List"
items in a view in Ecco, and have that same ordering of
items show up in your Palm PDA.
Pop-Up / Sub-folder helper
Have you ever been confused about whether to use a pop-up
column or sub-folders? Have you ever wished you could
have it both ways? Now you can...
For example: If you have a "Projects" folder
and would like to send items to the "Projects"
folder which is sorted by pop-up value, but would also
like to have the power of having the items in project
specific sub-folders, this helper will synchronize the
two.
Folder Rule
The filters in Ecco are really wonderful. The auto assign
rules are great, but they're a little feeble. We've built
a capability that allows lots more power and flexibility.
We aren't enabling the interfaces for the full rules and
macros just yet, but we have enabled one rule in this
first release that we just couldn't do without.
This rule works somewhat like an auto assign rule, but
uses a folder instead of the item text. We use this all
the time in our "GTD" template to save a couple
of keystrokes or mouse movements when processing our InBasket.
It's always been a pain that it takes more than one gesture
to assign something to a date folder. What we do with
the folder rule is use a checkmark folder and use a rule
to put anything that shows up in the checkmark folder
into a specified date folder as well. It's a really subtle
difference, but those gestures really add up!
Time Stamper
Ever been annoyed by the fact that the only easy
way to log modification time of an Ecco item is to use a
"*" auto assign rule on a date folder, and that
the dates are in one day granularity. What we've done is
increated the granularity of the modification timestamps
to be 5 minutes, and added the ability to get a true "created"
timestamp that doesn't change.
Visible Context
Sometimes it would be nice to be able to do things with
Ecco reports that you just can't do... Things like re-grouping
sub items under a different header, fancy sorting, etc.
What we've done is really simple, but very effective.
We allow you to create folder associations for an item's:
ID, it's parent's ID, it's TLI's ID, it's parent's text,
and it's TLI's text. These associations can be shown in
columns and exported to Excel. Once in Excel, you can
then slice and dice the data to create pretty much any
kind of report. Without this context data, it was very
difficult to have that flexibility.
Dependencies
Ecco has always
been great for managing small projects. When it comes
to coordinating a small group of people I don't think
there is anything better. MS-Project just seems to be
overkill and it lacks the kind of rapid-fire flexibility
needed for managing projects using light-weight methodologies
like XP (extreme programming).
The one thing
that has always been missing is some way of handling "dependencies".
Ecco Helpers has a very simple but very powerful and effective
tool for handling dependencies. By showing the ID's of
the items you are working with, you can create a comma
separated list of either predecessors or successors. Ecco
Helpers will synchronize the lists and then will check
all of the predecessors of an item. If all the predecessors
of the item are "Done" then the item will be
made actionable.
